Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  I had my wife’s gift in a shopping bag. I had my doubts, which I don’t have when I buy things for my children. My doubts are that nothing I buy my wife can express my feelings for her. I love her looks and her humor. I fear my reactions to her moods and her commands. She is a hard person to shop for, and the nightgown or brooch I buy her can’t match, let’s say, the hand-carved, bass wood canoe paddle my wife produces for me on Christmas Eve.

  That was worth telling the man I was on my way to see, for maybe once upon a time he had had the same experience. I would not wish to pry. Certainly not into the tragedy that had come to him apparently around the time I had first made his acquaintance.

  Often I had bent his ear so that we didn’t know where the time had gone. I had told him all my stories. Once I had killed a burglar with a half-full bottle of apple juice in accidental self-defense and had had to go to court and could not believe that I had done what I had done. Another year I had hit a school crossing-guard, an unmarried woman in a yellow slicker and a pert, novel type of cap, who had stepped like an actress or an apparition out from behind a rental van as I approached an intersection and when I hit her I seemed to knock her back into the slot she had emerged from. My father had had a long, hopeless illness but had then shocked us all by suddenly dying. It seemed to have been a hard life all around, but I couldn’t believe this, and I was at least glad to hear myself say so to the man I was traveling out to see.

  He knew me, I guess, and it was a pleasure to talk to him on these visits I paid him from time to time. I asked him if he would retire completely. He didn’t know. I suggested he come into town for a play I would get tickets for, but he felt he would rather not—as if it weren’t a good idea.

  In the train window, the tops of the trees made a movie of the low winter sun. They divided endlessly the distance between me and where I was going.

  The flaxen-haired woman smiled at what she was reading. The conductor told us the next stop over the loudspeaker. I thought that from time to time you have to come up with something. My host had said this.

  My wife had asked to come with me in April soon after I had met him. She had sat in one comfortable corner of the room, the study it was—and she was both between me and my host and beyond us. A memorable visit. In amicable fashion, we had gotten onto my nature and my wife’s periodic spells (to put, no doubt, too explicit a label to it). We could not decide if she had been frozen out by me from time to time, or what. What the devil do I mean we could not decide? A bell had rung and our host excused himself and was heard at the other end of the house saying, "Put them there," loudly as if the person was coming in from outdoors; then there were scuffing noises and a faint concussion. Our host didn’t come back and I pulled out an old medical text and asked my wife if she’d like something to read, which for some reason is a joke between us. Our host came back into the room and stood at the door rolling his head at us with mysterious humor, secretly powerful, even if not for us. We resumed, and presently a clock struck somewhere. The clock had made us aware of the house.

  My wife sat straight up on the edge of the couch. In the end, as we were leaving and after I had phoned for a cab, she asked in her own abrupt way a personal question.

  "Are you married?" she said.

  Our host smiled his crooked, courteous smile.

  "I was," he said. "I was until a few weeks ago."

  My wife looked from him to me. He told us what had happened. His wife had fallen from a ladder in the garage, had hurt her leg and died of a blood clot. A freak accident.

  ‘Thirty-five years," he said. "Just like that. It’s a lifetime," he said, still with the smile in the manner of the quiet host who says he’s glad you were able to make it.

  "Damn," he said; "damn, damn, damn."

  He raised his hand, and, unsteady on his feet for a moment, he snapped his hand to one side—an idiosyncrasy of his that brushed away irritation or that said, Well, that’s over with.

  A door shut heavily, the impact came through the air as if that room, wherever it was, was sealed with carpets and drapes. But passing out through what might have been a waiting room in this wing of the house, we found an extraordinarily fat woman sitting on the couch smoking, staring straight ahead. And I remember a new car was parked in the driveway. Then our cab came.

  I had wanted to see him again, I mean at once. I wanted to know what he had thought of us.

  My wife said, "He didn’t like me, I could see that."

  I had smelled the spring and, as we passed a green golf course that rose like a meadow away from the road, my wife leaned on me and kissed me on the cheek.

  She wondered if he had children. Of course, he must, she said. I said, Oh yes. She thought he’d had a quick drink, probably a stiff one, while we were waiting for him to come back. She made an observation or two on the constant threat of immaturity and on the need to keep the parts of one’s life distinct. "But I didn’t think he liked me; I came between you," she said, and she clasped her hands in her lap. "He’s really quite a charming man," she said. "I’m terribly hungry, how about you?" I remember her words.

  I didn’t ask him about himself. We kept it at a different level. I was in the middle of my life, if I could stay in. I mentioned a friend I had had who had let me know I held back too much; I should open with him more about my life. That is, our friendship depended on it. Naturally I came to find this view precious, not to say a pain. He wanted to know what my relationship was with a woman whom we both knew. As if what my revered friend did not know about my life waited secretly between us—call it misdemeanors accumulating interest unspeakable into my life whose integrity needed him. I have said too much too fast, as if I were short of time. My host once observed that I had a somewhat formal style of speaking.

  Other friends I spoke of not so much as of my wife and of my two children, now at their different levels nearly grown. My wife, I said. The words are said less easily nowadays. I think my wife has found a spark in me. I had come to know my family better through my conversations with this semi-retired doctor. Not that he said much. But my family became so comforting to me in his presence that I would see my daughters with a distinctness that hurt, at the same time that I saw them stand up strong, truthful, unharmed, and independent, while I saw the finest brushmarks in my wife’s hair after she had drawn it back so tightly it shone like a reflection.

  Which is the journey, which the destination? The train I had so often taken recalled such things. The woman across the aisle did not look up when I put on my overcoat.

  I left the train, crossed the platform, and passed down an icy ramp. Like a resident I carried the shopping bag with my wife’s Christmas present. I gave the strange cab driver the address, and he named the person I was going to see.

  The driver was big and fat and, below his thick, gray hair, his skin had a powdery softness infinitesimally wrinkled. We passed the golf-course sign and we passed a white lawn with colored figures on it. Again I saw what I wanted to see. I had been irritated with the driver because in speaking the name of the person I was going to see he seemed to pry. I made conversation. I asked if he had his snows on. He said that on bad days he used chains too; you could waste two hours spinning your wheels in driveways, and he said something else which went right out of my head because we had approached the house and I wondered why the hell I had come, and I believe that instead of responding to whatever the man had said I said perfunctorily that I didn’t know.

  Behind me were the subway train and the railroad train, throw in some angry bicyclist with his bicycle, and now a taxi. I could not check my thoughts. I wondered if my wife was seeing someone and was reluctant to tell me. And would she if I asked? Or would she only if I didn’t ask? Because my host understood often without asking. I would tell him a joke, I would tell him he was not going to like what I was about to say, I would tell him the truth that I had almost not come and I would ask if he thought Christmas upset your biorhythms and if there were such things, and I would throw in the
Jesus kids Saturday night; I would tell why I’d be damned if I’d answer the kid with the Bhagavad-Gita in Grand Central, and I would reiterate my notion that there are many gods who preside in the things that touch us and move us, gods we look up and down to, gods we enlist the support of, and I recalled the gambler in Anchorage who staked what he didn’t possess, lucky as a god and driven like a god. And I would add that—to quote one of the old polymaths—Pascal, Emerson, my daughter would know what I was recalling—when we most fly those gods, then they are most our fuel, or something to that effect—it had gods in it.

  One of them drove too close to me on a three-lane northbound artery looking for trouble and when I yelled at him he shook his head deafly and grinned, and another came up behind him and they two took off around the next curve and must have vanished at the next exit in pursuit of each other or some such nonsense. I would tell my host all this and more and would tell how in the train I’d suddenly known I would see what I wanted to see; and I would talk about my wife as if she were there with us.

  All right, I was bringing him some pretty good stuff today; I saw him smile inwardly at this. I felt better, and, as if experiencing difficulty in getting out of the cab, I could not for a moment get my hands on the right money to give the driver. I left him and he left me at the entrance to the driveway. Two cars were parked in the driveway; one had a Maryland plate and one, I half-noted from its color, was from further away.

  The glass panes in the double doors of the garage were frosted over as if with Halloween soap. The sound of the cab receding rose and fell. I felt in my pockets and found a glove in each. I didn’t put them on but bunched one in each hand inside each pocket. My wife was home. I saw her in bed. I didn’t see her face but I heard her voice. She reached one fine hand toward her bed table.

  I went across the snowy flagstones to the square flagstone porch, which was like a large doorstep. Two front doors faced at right angles to each other and were adjacent. The left one was locked, so I rang. I rubbed my hands together and heard myself way inside my heavy coat and muffler go, "Ho ho ho," and I dug my hands down into my pockets. Fir trees set the lawn off from the road. A car passed and then another in the same direction. I waited and rang again and wasn’t sure how many times I’d rung. He was on the phone or someone was with him and the door had gotten locked. The winter silence was of Christmas morning or of Sunday. What was missing was in me. I wondered if someday I might heal someone. I rang again.

  I turned to see on the other side of the trees a car pass in each direction like curtains closing and opening at the same time. I looked at the other front door, with little oblong windows on either side of it. It led to the main part of the house, a one-story suburban dwelling. I pressed the one bell again and didn’t hear it and realized I had never heard it and then remembered I had heard it once from inside. My feet were cold. My wife was lying on her elbow, thinking less hopefully than I about the past, her hair down, shaking her head and smiling. I could very nearly see my host, and he was looking at his watch and saying to whoever was with him, "Wonder where he is."

  What was happening had never happened. I stared at the bell, which was in the corner between the two front doors, and in the corner of my eye I felt appear and disappear in one of the narrow panes running vertically beside the right-hand door a face, and I could have sworn it was a woman. I rang once more and peered through the glass beside the right-hand front door to see what I could see. A carpeted foyer. The end of a living room maybe. Part of a window looking onto trees at the north side of the house. I stepped back.

  Everything had passed out of my head and I had no idea what was going on, until then the right front door unlatched and swung open, and there was my host in broad daylight—hair not too thin, freckles at the temples, faintly wall-eyed. He was shaking his head, or he was rolling it, I don’t know what he was doing but he had been amused before he saw me and he was feeling just as good now. His eyes were misted and attentive. He was a different man. He had on a red-and-black lumberjack shirt. Along his jaw and cheeks was a silvery sheen of stubble.

  He’d had something to drink, and his leisurely, slow speech hit me like a code: "Do you know I phoned you?" He’d had a few drinks. He chuckled as slowly as he talked. "I tried to put you off, but I didn’t remember in time."

  I said, like a person of lower rank, that no one had gotten the message; and at once I saw this was an odd thing to say.

  "My family arrived last night. From California . . . from Washington." He flipped his hand out to the side. "I didn’t expect them until Christmas Eve, and they got away earlier and phoned me and—" he threw out both hands, happy with fate.

  I said something like What the hell, sorry I didn’t get the message.

  "Didn’t get the message?" he wheedled, and he chuckled as if I had come up with an idea he hadn’t thought of, and he frowned unsteadily. "Well, come in and meet my family." He stepped backward, and I stepped into the foyer with my cold snowy feet and felt huge.

  This was the other part of the house, not where the study was, and I had lost something, which, it came to me, had been my opportunity to go on waiting.

  I followed my host out of the dark foyer into a living room that opened to my right. And although what I had lost was my purpose, I found in the accident, in the awkward foul-up, a polite power.

  My host was introducing me by my surname to two young men in their twenties, his sons. The introduction didn’t take long. Behind him, from somewhere at the far end of the room a tall, dark-haired young woman appeared as if drawn out of hiding. There was a door there. She must have been in the room talking with them. She was the woman here. All that curly hair of hers seemed playful in its abundance.

  The son on my right did not get up but raised his hand to shake mine. The hand was hardly waiting to be gripped; it was where I was not. A scar like a seam cut down across his forehead and finished at the bridge of his thick nose. The second son, whose equally pale face was bearded and who wore a gold ring on his ring finger, took a swift stride or two toward me, gripped my hand, and stepped back. Beyond him the father came to introduce me to his daughter, who came forward and shook my hand as if she were shrugging. She wore bluejeans and a large, luxurious ski sweater, dark green, with a high neck that came up under her chin. Her hand was cold. Her face was very tan. I started to say the dumb thing that had just come to mind but didn’t say it; she blushed; I realized her hand was cold because she had been outside.

  I had left my wife’s present in the taxi.

  The three young people were being given what I had envisioned as my time, and they didn’t want it, I mean they didn’t want mine. Their father was feeling no pain. They had been talking about who I could possibly be, before their father had hauled himself up to go confirm his suspicion. But before that they had been talking of a whole life. But he must have known exactly who it was ringing the bell.

  I said, "You all haven’t been together in quite a while."

  I was a little angry, partly about leaving my wife’s present if not the thought that went with it in the cab. Well, they weren’t saying what was on their minds, and I was in this as if I and the father between us had brought them out. These serious young people. He knew me very well. The girl looked at me as if out of a tableau. She and her brothers were three serious, invaded faces. They seemed young for a thirty-five-year marriage. Nothing could be said until I left. Yet I could say what I wanted, for I always did here.

  I knew what they had been talking about, knew it as certainly as I found a freedom in my embarrassment. But then no, I did not know what they had been talking about. I thought of the woman who was absent from this room. She came to me as if I had seen her.

  "I’ll call a cab," I said.

  "Oh no," my host said slowly, "I’ll drive you, I’ll drive you."

  I decided that the door at the far end of the room must lead to the kitchen and beyond it the garage, a car, a lawn mower, a ladder.

  "It’s better if I call a
cab," I said and felt in my eyes looking at the fire on the hearth a warmth of excitement beyond my politeness.

  "Oh no, I’ll drive you," my host said. "It’s not far to the station."

  His children looked to me. Their father knew me. They wanted me to disappear, by cab.

  I had a grievance. The clock struck a quarter of, and there it stood on the mantel; I’d heard it many times from a distance.

  I knew where a phone was, and I nodded and left the room, and my host came shuffling along the carpet behind me. I found the way from the foyer into the other wing of the house. I went into his study and he said, "Where you going?" But just as I reached for the phone on the desk I heard a car horn close by, distinctly stationary, and instead of the phone in my hand I found I had made a fist. I turned to my host, and the car honked again.

  "I had some pretty good stuff for you," I said.

  "Good stuff?" he said, and smiled and rolled his head. My words had come back to me.

  "I’m glad your family’s here," I said, feeling sincere.

  "They’re delightful people," he said, as if that’s what they were— people. "I can’t tell you what delightful people they are."

  "You’re not going to like what I’m about to say," I said, "but you should have tried harder to get in touch with me."

  "Damn it all, you’re right," he said, and smiled with good-humored understanding of what I had said.

  "Well, you don’t need visitors today," I said. I meant extra visitors, but then I didn’t mean that either. I saw us in a car, and he was playing games with the white line.

  "Your time isn’t your own," I said. "No," I said, "I mean if you’re going to give time to someone, you don’t want to give it away. I mean, it ought to be still yours. How about that?"

  "That’s pretty good," said my host.

  "It wasn’t what I was going to say," I said.